The Pursuit of Knowledge Quotes

“The only time when you and I really entered into literature, entered the kingdom of letters, was when each of us sat as a child absorbed in the magic pages of a book: in some snug corner of a quiet room or sheltered in some lost recess of the seashore with the muffled sound of the wind and sea to concentrate our thought — that is reading, that is literature.”
― Stephen Leacock, The Pursuit of Knowledge: A Discussion of Freedom and Compulsion in Education

“All over the world for a hundred years, almost, there have been people reading Dickens. In town and in country, at home and abroad, in winter with the candles lighted and the outside world forgotten; in summer beneath a shadowing tree or in a sheltered corner of the beach; in garret bedrooms, in frontier cabins, in the light of the camp fire and in the long vigil of the sickroom — people reading Dickens.

And everywhere the mind enthralled, absorbed, uplifted; the anxieties of life, the grind of poverty, the loneliness of bereavement, and the longings of exile, forgotten, conjured away, as there arises from the magic page the inner vision of the lanes and fields of England, and on the ear the murmured sounds of London, the tide washing up the Thames, and the fog falling upon Lincoln's Inn.”
― Stephen Leacock, The Pursuit of Knowledge: A Discussion of Freedom and Compulsion in Education

“The true professor of English would be a sort of inspired person, a little silly, fond of reciting and reading aloud, unconscious of time and place, filled with intense admiration and terrific denunciations, admired and pitied by his students. Such a man with his childish conceit, his tattered wits, his flushed cheeks, and his transparent sincerity is the inspiration of the classroom, — he is the spirit of literature itself. Can a man like that examine ? Of course not. He lets them all through. But even the least gifted has caught something of our inspiration.”
― Stephen Leacock, The Pursuit of Knowledge: A Discussion of Freedom and Compulsion in Education